New Zen Chipsets Spotted!

The new Zen chipset has been spotted! Mind you it’s the chipset on the motherboard not the actual CPUs. But before we dive into it let’s explore the actual new AM4 APUs that have been released and will be available on the AM4 platform.

As shown in the table above, AMD will be relaunching its FM2/FM2+ series of APUs under new names (But essentially the same products) on the AM4 platform in a move to unify both the APUs and future CPUs on the same platform (And eventually make the FM series go away). We see AMD sticking again with their usual plan for making “E” APUs for lower TDP but reduced clock speeds and launching a new Athlon X4 refresh.

This graph was also released showing the A12-9800 against the 6500 in both of their low-power consumption variants

As you can see the APU shows some pretty interesting results but again. AMD is putting some powerful iGPUs into their APUs and these benchmarks are GPU accelerated.

Now let’s talk actual AM4 chipsets.

This is very interesting since AMD is now also focusing on pushing mITX motherboards into the market which were absolutely hard to find previously on FM2+ and AM3+. It’ll be launching with the X,B and A 300 variants (Obviously X is the higher end, B is the mainstream and A is the budget)

As you can see the A320 which will be the equivalent of the 760G and A68H on the AM3 and FM2 platforms respectively which obviously just bares the essentials you need to run an AM4 CPU/APU and no overclocking support.

When we move over to the B350 chipset we start to get into the juicy stuff. This, like the 970 and A78, supports overclocking and has what most people would want out of a motherboard in a gaming system.

The newer chipset that still isn’t named yet, will most likely be named the X380 following AMD’s former naming scheme with the X/B/A 300 and the other A/B chipsets. The only benefit this chipset will have over the B350 is CrossFire support with more PCI-e lanes. Just like the 990FX These new chipsets and all future Zen chipsets will natively support PCI-e 3.0 (finally), USB 3.1 Gen2, DDR4 and NVM-e as shown here